book review: Carol Leonard’s Lady’s Hands, Lion’s Heart: A Midwife’s Saga

Lady’s Hands, Lion’s Heart is a deeply-felt book. It’s funny and sad and engaging, in large part because of its very straightforward and honest–sometimes nearly raw–narrative voice.

This 2008 memoir covers the years 1975 to 1986, beginning with the author’s experience giving birth to her only child. She ends up having an unmedicated hospital birth with an almost-openly misogynist OB who straps down her arms and says absolutely terrible things to her (on top of the routine enema, shaving, episiotomy, etc.). Of the moments after meeting her baby, she writes:

This is when the conflicting emotions begin. I am incredibly high from giving birth, proud that my body is so strong and wise. [...] I feel thwarted that my accomplishment has somehow been belittled, that I have been strapped down [...], degraded and humiliated in the most sacred of times. (20)

From this moment of joy and anger, Leonard throws herself into women’s healthcare and advocacy, volunteering at a clinic and apprenticing with a family doctor who assists at homebirths while her own baby is still tiny. She’s hard core: the schedule she keeps through much of the story, and the sheer numbers of births she attends in a year, makes me feel like lying down. The book follows Leonard’s intertwined professional, romantic, family, and political lives from there. It narrates many birth experiences along the way, but it’s not a collection of birth stories: it is, as the subtitle announces, “a midwife’s saga.”

It’s a pleasure to read a midwife’s voice explicitly embracing the full range of reproductive healthcare options and power for women. Leonard doesn’t seem to identify as a feminist–she refers to “my feminist girlfriends” in a way that makes them sound like a valued but quite separate group (255)–but she’s most certainly pro-choice and as well as committed to hooking people up with safe and effective contraception. Her career in women’s health actually begins as a ‘procedure room person,’ supporting people during abortions at New Hampshire Women’s Health Services (later renamed Concord Feminist Health Center and still in business), and she never seems to lose track of those roots.

It’s also–definitely not a pleasure but–important and valuable to read a midwife’s voice talking about the ugly sides of women’s lives in our culture. Of course Leonard encounters pregnancy loss and similarly uncontrollable tragedies, but she also attends births that involve homelessness, abuse, rape, father-daughter incest, and other manifestations of cruelty, vulnerability, and misogyny. Without going into a lot of analysis, her stories hint meaningfully at the systematic nature of some of these ‘personal’ struggles.

The book would have benefited from more careful editing. There are some bizarre semicolons, for instance, and the use of the present tense throughout creates some issues of clarity and style (including confusing and/or ugly moments when verb tenses are mixed, apparently accidentally, within a sentence). Some of the sections are titled, some aren’t, and some transitions seem more like non sequiturs. But I sort of got used to it all as I went along, and the book’s content and voice certainly rise above these details.